May 26, 2022 • 28 mins
THE DON Season 2: Maverick, Top Gun, Don’s Greatest Hits, And The Addictions That Killed Him”
Episode 2- “MORE DON FANTASIES COME TRUE”-- We look into Don’s influence on American Gigolo, Richard Gere’s infamous full frontal nude shot, Don’s relationship with fashion designer Gorgio Armani, Don’s invention of high concept, and teaming up with Warren Beatty to seek revenge against a powerful art house movie critic.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
In this episode, we look at Don's influence on American
jiggler Richard gears infamous full frontal nude shot, Don's relationship
with fashion designer Georgio Armani, Don's invention of high concept,
and teaming up with Warren Beatty to seek revenge against
film critic Pauline Kale. Episode two more Don Fantasies come True.
(00:26):
Don had the sense an Alaskan sized title wave was
coming to Hollywood, a wave that would wash away the
indie filmmakers of the seventies, clearing the way for the
commercial films of the eighties. The movie that he felt
could help shake things up was American Jiggelow. You know
who I know who you are? And how is your tha?
(00:54):
You know what I'm thinking? Do you want to be here?
Do you want to be with name? His name is
Julian Kay? What you expected? His business? His pleasure. Of
all the autour directors from the Malibu scene, there were
(01:16):
perhaps only two that Don felt he could work with,
Brian de Palma and Paul Schrader. With the Palma, Don
saw a stylistic, kindred spirit of the lurid and the
sensationalistic It was diploma who Don would first seek out
to direct Flash Dance for a short time diploma was
attached to direct before dropping out to make Scarface. With Schrader,
(01:39):
it was more of a personality thing. Don and Paul
always seemed to be the last one standing at Julia
Phillips Malibu beach parties. High on cocaine. They would talk
through the night about movies, religion, philosophy. They both shared
a conservative religious upbringing. Both came to Los Angeles as
a means to escape the rigid conformity of the church.
(01:59):
Schrader documents this in his very personal film Hardcore middle
class Person Red Westerner go to the church, believes in God,
and to believe that at the end of his life
would be redeemed. It doesn't make me sense for you.
I don't know why I should have to find yourself
to you. I don't care about the things you care about.
(02:21):
I don't care what's happening in the Ends of New York.
I don't care about the movie that TV. I don't
care it was on Johnny Carson. Well, what do you
care about? Care about my daughter? Trader was a Calvinist
who took the view of Plato and Sophocles that delayed
(02:42):
gratification was required for a path to happiness, whereas Don
chose the path of Siddartha, the hedonistic first part of
the tale, finding nirvana through excess, finding happiness through instant gratification.
For Don, less was not more. More was more. It
was in American Gigolow, where they're opposing beliefs came together.
(03:02):
As Pierce recounts with Gloria Needham of KTBC, Don saw
Giggolo as the ultimate male fantasy, handsome drift who speaks
seven languages, who gets paid to sleep with beautiful women,
wear Customermani suits, pump i and snork cocaine, and drive
a bitch in Mercedes. I mean, who wouldn't want to
(03:22):
be that guy? As Pierce describes it, Giggielow was out
of biographical. It was in the sense that the movie
was about a man like Don who comes to Los
Angeles to sell himself and winds up selling his soul.
According to Pierce, in those early days, Don was a
loner who lived through his movies and who so desperately
wanted to star in them. His lifelong dream of directing
(03:45):
was something he carried with him until his Final Days.
If only Don could have directed, But Don wasn't the director.
Where Don saw a movie about free will, Schrader saw
existential despair. Where Don saw glossy commercial film with Richard
Gear strutting around in his underwear and a montage devoted
entirely around him getting dressed, Schrader saw a somber French
(04:07):
New Wave film. He even lifted the last scene of
Brisson's Pickpocket for the ending Gosh. In that final scene,
Schrader is trying to make a religious statement, which is
(04:29):
what makes the film a signature Schrader movie. But what
makes the film an unmistakably Don Simpson movie was the
glitz and the glamor, and how gay the whole movie was.
After Saturday Night Fever, Don had again taken on his
mission statement that Peter Biskind referenced in his book Easy Writer,
Raging Boss. Don was repackaging gay culture for a heterosexual audience.
(04:53):
When I first interviewed Don, we went out on Santa
Monica Boulevard looking for the prototype for the movie. I
said to Don, look, there's no straight gigglows in West Hollywood.
They're all gay. And Don said, that's actually a good thing.
We can create our own gigglow. What he meant by
that was that the best sort of movie is when
you can create our own fantasy. And so that's why
(05:16):
you see scene after scene devoted to showing Richard Gear
like Cinderella going to the ball, spending hours getting dressed,
trying on outfits. But in this case it wasn't a
costume designer pulling clothes for Richard Gere. Don had recruited
Georgio Armani. At that time, Armani was relatively unknown in America.
In a two hour running time, the film showcases every
(05:39):
stitch of Armani's line brand creation on the movie screen.
It had never been done before. I mean, for Don,
the clothes always made the man. It got to one
point during shooting that Richard Gear had to ask are
you filming my character or the clothes? And Don's response was,
how about we go to the other extra and have
(06:00):
you in no clothes at all. American Giggielow marked the
first time a major Hollywood actor went full frontal on screen.
It's the kind of gratuitous nude we've seen women pose
for a million times. How did Don and Schrader rationalize
the scene with the studio. At the time, Paramount was
coming out with their Oscar favorite Ordinary People and prepping
(06:22):
the kid friendly Indiana Jones. Why rescorting controversy from the
religious right and Jerry Folwell, it was Don's upbringing as
a child, growing up with fundamentalist parents. Don knew better
than anyone that poking the religious right could be good
for business. The critics, but for a select few, hated
the film. It's a strong picture. I agree with you,
(06:45):
and you know, Roger, you and I are alone. I
think as critics cross the country in liking this picture,
everybody else seems to be knocking it. I don't understand why.
But the gamble paid off. Audiences and even the most
conservative parts of the country loved the film. Don had
turned another relative unknown actor, in this case Richard Gere
(07:06):
into a movie star after Giggelow. Don had no interest
in working with another a tour filmmaker invoking themes of
Dostoevsky and Bresson. Don was a populist. He wanted to
entertain everyone Red states and blue states, and he had
a unique vision for what a Don Simpson movie could be.
It was more than a vision, it was a manifesto,
(07:28):
written late at night after perhaps one too many lines
of cocaine. It was over thirty pages long. He would
title it high Concept. When we return, we'll learn of
how Don's wild night on cocaine would produce the memo
that would forever change the movie business. I was there
(07:58):
the night he wrote the memo. We were Jimmy Green's
house off Miller Drive, behind the Chateau. It was the
house they used in Lee Marvin's Point Blank. Jimmy was
a big real estate developer. He was known for his
parties with the late late crowd coming over from the
Rainbow Room, the washed up heavy metal rockers, the broken
party girls, the real estate fat cats looking for young girls,
(08:20):
you know Don's people. Anyway, I hadn't seen Don in
over two hours. Then somebody said he'd locked himself in
the bathroom. I finally get him to open the door.
He's on the floor. There he is. He's got his
shirt off. He's very tan in his five oh one jeans.
This was when Don was very handsome, around the time
(08:41):
he had the offer to pose for Play Girl. Anyway,
he's on speaker phone and he's dictating what I can
only describe as a sermon to his assistant. It really
felt like I was hearing something profound and important. I mean,
I still remember the opening lines, we have obligation to
(09:02):
make history. We have no obligation to make art. Our
only obligation is to make money. It was the Gettysburg
address of Hollywood memos. Don tells me the memo is
called high concept. Ask him what it means. He says,
high concept is a concept you can summer in a
(09:23):
single sentence, thirty seconds or less, pitched in the elevator,
in the hot dog line at the bank. Then he
tells me to turn on the TV to MTV. Bands
can reach millions of people in a two minute video.
The movie business needs this kind of marketing. We need
to understand the movie in a slogan, in a phrase,
(09:46):
in a concept. The high concept phrase spread like wildfire.
Dan was preaching a whole new way to view popular culture, music, art, movies, politics,
All of it could be consumed through one big idea.
For those who have abandoned hope, we'll restore hope, and
(10:20):
we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make
America great again. Some say high concept was just another
term for dumbing things down. Others argued that no, what
high concept meant was a rigorous vetting of the big
idea that could reach the largest audience in Hollywood. Everybody
was talking about the memo and scrambling to figure out
(10:41):
how to translate Don's prophecy into action. Years later, the
founder of Grand Theft, Auto and rock Star Games, one
of the most successful video game companies of all time,
was so inspired by the maverick nature of Don Simpson
and his high concept that he asked his employees to
wear t shirts with Don's face printed on them eve
and after his death. Don was the wild maverick character
(11:03):
that corporate CEOs aspired to be. But it wasn't just
Dun's memo that changed the business. It was Don's understanding
of the economics of the business. The way that Don
broke it down to me was a simple art versus
commerce formula. In the nineties seventies, the art drove the money.
You took a chance on an artist, you part up
three million for the picture, and you hope for the best.
(11:25):
Release costs were minimal. The marketing ads were paid by
the theaters. You opened the movie in just a few cities.
The states were low if you get the budgets low.
But Dawn said no to all of that. Don said,
let's make pictures with confidence. Let's put our money in
a concept that we all believe in. Let's go all
(11:47):
in with national media buys. Let's open wide and blow
the other studios out of the water. The concept was
revolutionary at the time, but for Dan's scheme to work,
his team had to convince the head of the studio,
Charlie Bluehorn. That would prove difficult. The press nicknamed Bluethorn,
Hurricane Charlie and the mad Austrian of Wall Street. Charlie
(12:10):
was a blustery, emotional man who cried at movies and
spoke in a heavy accent. Go by the seat of
your pants. Make pictures people want to see, not this
fancy schmancy stuff. I want to see tears laughs. Barry
Diller called him a romantic businessman, a one of a kind,
and Charlie Don saw a mentor, a guy whose restlessness
(12:32):
matched his own. The problem was Charlie was too restless.
Don could never pin him down. He was spending more
and more time in the Dominican Republic, where he was
building his very own city to make that happen, he
was frequently on the phone with Richard Nixon trying to
curry economic advantages for his Dominican sugar plantations. I don't
(12:52):
believe in and let people hit up saying older you
will leave this part of the body its plesser land,
and so they comes to take acres away from you.
Usually responded by saying that I'm going to support you
(13:12):
for government next year because one of you. He says,
you don't want to lose of your life acres to me.
That doesn't have any logic or any nets at all.
With Bluehorn's obsession with Nixon and his dream of his
empire city and the Dominican he had become largely absent
from the studio, Don would lose an ally who shared
his passion for movies. He was already out of step
(13:35):
with the Killer Dillers. Diller and Michael Eisner and Katzenberg
were businessmen, first number counters, and their bottom line was
under threat from a looming writer's guild strike. It was
so tense at the studio that Eisner would green light
six films in one day to go into production. One
of them was a film Don warned him not to
make He was a beautiful white dog that was hurt
(14:01):
and wounded. She nursed him back to health. He became
her best friend. What are you doing? Playful, loyal, protective,
He was a perfect companion until she discovered someone trained
(14:23):
him to attack and kill at will. You got yourself
an attacked dog, a dog trained by the professionals to
attack people. That dog that's got to be stopped before
he killed somebody. So let's say somebody training to be
an attacked dog. There's got to be a place when
(14:45):
you retrain these dogs, and I'll find a place. Come on, Julie,
you got a four leg A time bomb. White Dog
was based on a novel written by Roman Gary. The
BBC called Roman Gary one of the great literary con men.
So invited us for dinner. And when a few weeks
later I left for Paris again where I had work,
(15:06):
I said, too, of my Garry, please take care of
my wife. She will be a learning company. He said, sure,
I'll do, and he did. Jean Seberg barely twenty one
years old. Roman Gary was a figure of immense glamor,
a soldier who had fought alongside the goal, an author
whose novel The Roots of heaven had won the prestigious
pregn cour Gary was a nineteen fifty nine Francis consul
(15:30):
general in Los Angeles. I was in Paris to interview Gary.
There was a rumor he challenged Clint Eastward to a
duel after having an affair with his wife, Jean Seberg.
Gary said it was true. This was just months before
he committed suicide. He was more than a novelist. He
was a screenwriter. He was an aviator, a war hero,
(15:51):
a French diplomat. He died with JFK dated Starlett's. But
what he was perhaps best known for was being an
absolutely conscionable liar. He lied so much his biographer entitled
his book at all story. He made up stories the
way you and I made up beds. Of course, it
(16:12):
wasn't at all surprising that Don found Gary to be
quite a colorful character. But Gary didn't feel the same
way about Dawn. Gary wanted no part of a culture
that glorified toxic masculinity. He thought men like Don were
using masculinity as a facade to cover up weakness. It
was an odd relationship, one con man calling out another.
(16:36):
We could find no statements that Don had a personal
vendetta against Gary or any relationship at all, but it
was clear he thought a movie about a racist attack
dog would be a disaster. Gary supposedly wrote it as
an allegorical fable based on Jean Seeberg in her time
with the Black Panthers. In the movie, a young Hollywood
actress played by Christie McNichol accidentally runs over a German shepherd.
(17:00):
Little does she know the dog has been trained as
a puppy to attack black people. I ain't no attack dog. God,
that's a white dog. Of course, he's a white dog.
I don't mean his color. He's gone to attack and
kill black people. That's crazy. I don't believe that. What
the hell? Huh? You see the scart, lady, You see
(17:22):
this goddamn scart? Well, I got that when I was
fourteen years old. A white dog did it. Eisner liked
the thematic questions of the story. Is racism inherent? Is
a curable? Is reform attainable? It's difficult to imagine a
studio today releasing a commercial movie with such philosophical intent.
For all of Eisner's talk, he touted its commercial appeal.
(17:46):
It was it was Jaws with paws. He shouted, but
instead of hiring a commercial director like Steven Spielberg, Paramount
hired perhaps the most econoclastic and most stubbornly independent director
of all time. Now Jeane Faller said, whenever you interview
any son of a bitch, you remember, there's not two faces.
There's not two sides, there's three. Now the third side
(18:09):
you'll never get to know. Really now we can call
the third side the mistress. Every human being has a
mistress in the brainy. Every the mom and papa will
never know what that son of daughter is saying ever
until they die. Never, no one will know. You can
be married for ninety years and the other the mate.
You will never know. That's called the third face. It's
(18:32):
a mistress. It's a secret. Don knew he wouldn't be
able to rein in Sam Fuller, not the man who
gave us the Naked Kiss and Shot Corridor. Fuller's big
idea was to shift the po V from the victims
to the dogs. We'd see the dogs slowly unraveled into
a psychotic killer of black people. Nobody at the studio
(18:53):
accounted for the protests from the black community. The n
double a CP came out warning the studio the film
would in site racial violence and told blacks to boycott.
The Black Anti Defamation Coalition warned it would spark race riots.
Don was beside himself. How did he get stuck with
a movie about a racist dog, and with another defiant
(19:14):
autour director whose mess he would have to clean up.
When would the studio learn this was not the way
to make money, let alone make movies. The bad publicity
piled up. The l A Times called it a racist production.
Don argued, how could a film production be racist? Fuller
fought with the press, arguing that they needed to show
the dark side of racism in order to see the
(19:36):
arc to anti racism. More groups threatened boycotts, and yet
Eisner was convinced it would be a hit. Just get
the poster ride and they'd be fine. Don knew better.
This was a rabid dog attacking people, not an ominous
shark in the water. There was no suspense, no drama.
Paramount Don thought had lost its way when he first
(19:59):
started it out at the studio, they had conviction. Now
they were cravenly hedging their bets, reducing exposure, selling off
foreign rights, which meant lower risk, but more cooks in
the kitchen, which to don was bad business. Either go
all in or go home. If you want to have
your bats, go to Wall Street. This was the movie business.
(20:21):
It didn't help matters that Hollywood studios were still holding
onto making art house films. And a big reason why
was that the American public listened to film critics unlike today.
They had tremendous cloud over whether a movie would do
well at the box office, and no critic had more
cloud than Pauline Kale. It's a very even thing, particularly
(20:43):
for a woman, I think, to be writing at home.
It's a It's a marvelous way to make a living.
I think I wanted all in my life to be
able to make them living at home. The only thing
I disliked is having to go to the city to
see the movies. I love seeing the movies, but it's
hell going through the process of getting to the city,
as I lived several hours from New York City. But
(21:04):
but the process is simply thinking. Really, I mean, writing
is simply, you know, putting down what you think and
to be paid for thinking. Uh, and to know that
you're doing something that that may even have some value,
that you know that some other people might enjoy that
process and share it with you. I mean, that's that's
(21:26):
a marvelous way to live. I mean, I can't think
of any better way to live. Kale was an unknown
writer in seven when she wrote a seven thousand word
review arguing that Bonnie and Clyde was a masterpiece. The
movie had been considered a failure, but after Kal's review,
it was reconsidered to be one of the great films
of the era. Kao had the power to make a
(21:47):
movie a hit or a failure at a time when
film criticism really mattered. Kale's reviews turned her into a
crusader for the art house film, and in Dawn, the
King of the Blockbuster, she would meet her match. When
We Return, Don and Warren Baby team up to take
down Pauline. Their rivalry began with Popeye. Bob Evans told
(22:18):
Don he wanted Altman to direct it. Don hated Altman movies,
and he hated the man even more. The feeling was mutual.
When Don died, Altman wrote, I only wish he had
suffered more. But Don was overruled by Evans, who had
great respect for Altman, in large part because everybody's favorite
art house critic Pauline Klee loved Altman. Evans got the
(22:42):
studio to give Altman a massive budget. Altman hired Jules Phifer,
another art house intellectual that Don loathe, to write the script.
He hired Robin Williams as the lead, even though he
had done nothing but Mork and Mindy. He then chose
Malten to shoot because it was as far away as
he could get from them. Ed Link, Dawn and the
paramount execs. In the end, Altman may just what Don
(23:05):
had feared an Oakland movie. In looking back on Popeye,
the movie has its qualities. There's a real sweetness to
the performances and all at once. I knew. I knew it. Once,
I knew he needed me until the day I die.
(23:29):
I won't know why I knew he needed me. He
could be fantasy. Oh, or maybe it's because he needs me.
(23:50):
He needs me. He needs me, he needs me, he
needs me, he needs me. But for Dawn, the results
were a disaster. Evans had taken their most commercial property
and turned it into an art house trifle. Don laid
the blame squarely on Pauline Kale. She was a menace
(24:11):
who needed to be terminated. Don wasn't the conniving sort
to plot Pauline Kale's demise. As fate would have it,
he wouldn't have to. The story goes that Warren Beatty
had been courting Pauline for months to produce movies with him.
Pauline was used to having movie stars and directors courting her.
Filmmakers like Robert Town had put in months of phone
calls and dinner dates to secure an admiring film review
(24:33):
that could bring millions in box office. But Betty had
a bigger endgame. He had sensed that Pauline was unhappy
at The New Yorker. Behind the scenes, he had negotiated
with Barry Diller to give Pauline an executive position. He
would promise her in office, and her first project would
be Love and Money, to be directed by James Toback,
whose movie Fingers Pauline had given a rave review. It
(24:58):
was easy for Beatty to sell Barry Diller on Pauline.
He had long been a fan and understood her importance
in the business. For Batty, it meant having an ally
at the studio to help him produce his movies. What
was shocking was that Pauline, the most famous film critic
in the world said yes. Just days after Beatty's proposal,
(25:19):
she would quit The New Yorker. Pauline's friends had warned
her not to go to Hollywood. She was a film
critic living in the Berkshires who would take the train
into New York City each week to see movies and
write reviews. She had a charmed life. Why give it
all up to move into those shark infested waters of Hollywood?
Don was asking the same question. You can imagine Don's
(25:41):
tremendous shock to learn of Paramounts new Higher, the critic
who had been the bane of Don's existence, was now
sitting in his office. Dawn couldn't believe his good fortune.
Here was Pauline Kale in his office talking about pretentious
art house movie projects that she like to make a paramount.
(26:02):
It wasn't a question of if Don would destroy the
career of Pauline Kale. It was a matter of when.
A few weeks into the job, Kale knew she was
in trouble. James Tobak had not been receptive to her
script notes. In his mind, a script was not finite,
but a morphous something to be shaped in production. When
(26:22):
Tobak froze her out. She saw protection in Barry Diller,
but it was soon clear to her that the business
was about getting movies made quickly, and that spending months
on scripts was not economically viable. To make matters worse,
she had to answer to Dawn, the man who, in
her mind, represented the lowest common denominator of filmmaking, a
(26:45):
Neanderthal who thought a movie's genius was in its marketing
potential as a one sentence tagline on a poster. Don,
for his part, treated Kale with respect. He of course
rejected every single one of her movie ideas, but always
with a polite note as to why the studio couldn't
give her the green light. This went on for months.
(27:07):
Pauline would go to Don's office and Don would politely
say no. As Don later told Paul Schrader, Pauline Kale
was his surprise birthday cake. All he had to do
was used the knife. For the next five months, ko
sat alone in her office, waiting for various producers to
drop by so she could offer up her opinions. Opinions
(27:27):
that at one time had shaped the hearts and minds
of film audiences all over the world were now deposited
into the trash bins of Paramount. There was simply no
path forward for Kal. Her only way out was to
quit the studio and crawl back to the New Yorker.
She wasn't the same critic when she returned. She had
seen the inside of the Hollywood machine firsthand, and it
(27:49):
was more loathsome than anything she had ever heard. She
had lost her love for the movies. The high concept
era was coming, and the beloved artist that she had championed, Altman, Ashby, Bogdanovitch, Koppola,
even Scorsese were sidelined. There was no purpose, no importance
for a great champion of films like Pauline Klee. Klee's
(28:12):
downfall was a big victory for Dawn. The great directors
of the decade were now pushed aside. Don's path was
now clear. There was a light at the end of
the tunnel, if he could only get out of his
own self destructive way. The Dawn season two is executive
produced by Will McCormick and David Harris Klein. Klein also
(28:35):
wrote and created the series. Mike Jursits is the editor,
sound designer, and producer of the series. The podcast is
produced and narrated by Malia River. Drew Louis Weymouth voices
the character of Pierce and also produces the series. For
more episodes of The Dawn season two, listened to the
series on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you
listen to podcasts.
In this episode, we look at Don's influence on American
jiggler Richard gears infamous full frontal nude shot, Don's relationship
with fashion designer Georgio Armani, Don's invention of high concept,
and teaming up with Warren Beatty to seek revenge against
film critic Pauline Kale. Episode two more Don Fantasies come True.
(00:26):
Don had the sense an Alaskan sized title wave was
coming to Hollywood, a wave that would wash away the
indie filmmakers of the seventies, clearing the way for the
commercial films of the eighties. The movie that he felt
could help shake things up was American Jiggelow. You know
who I know who you are? And how is your tha?
(00:54):
You know what I'm thinking? Do you want to be here?
Do you want to be with name? His name is
Julian Kay? What you expected? His business? His pleasure. Of
all the autour directors from the Malibu scene, there were
(01:16):
perhaps only two that Don felt he could work with,
Brian de Palma and Paul Schrader. With the Palma, Don
saw a stylistic, kindred spirit of the lurid and the
sensationalistic It was diploma who Don would first seek out
to direct Flash Dance for a short time diploma was
attached to direct before dropping out to make Scarface. With Schrader,
(01:39):
it was more of a personality thing. Don and Paul
always seemed to be the last one standing at Julia
Phillips Malibu beach parties. High on cocaine. They would talk
through the night about movies, religion, philosophy. They both shared
a conservative religious upbringing. Both came to Los Angeles as
a means to escape the rigid conformity of the church.
(01:59):
Schrader documents this in his very personal film Hardcore middle
class Person Red Westerner go to the church, believes in God,
and to believe that at the end of his life
would be redeemed. It doesn't make me sense for you.
I don't know why I should have to find yourself
to you. I don't care about the things you care about.
(02:21):
I don't care what's happening in the Ends of New York.
I don't care about the movie that TV. I don't
care it was on Johnny Carson. Well, what do you
care about? Care about my daughter? Trader was a Calvinist
who took the view of Plato and Sophocles that delayed
(02:42):
gratification was required for a path to happiness, whereas Don
chose the path of Siddartha, the hedonistic first part of
the tale, finding nirvana through excess, finding happiness through instant gratification.
For Don, less was not more. More was more. It
was in American Gigolow, where they're opposing beliefs came together.
(03:02):
As Pierce recounts with Gloria Needham of KTBC, Don saw
Giggolo as the ultimate male fantasy, handsome drift who speaks
seven languages, who gets paid to sleep with beautiful women,
wear Customermani suits, pump i and snork cocaine, and drive
a bitch in Mercedes. I mean, who wouldn't want to
(03:22):
be that guy? As Pierce describes it, Giggielow was out
of biographical. It was in the sense that the movie
was about a man like Don who comes to Los
Angeles to sell himself and winds up selling his soul.
According to Pierce, in those early days, Don was a
loner who lived through his movies and who so desperately
wanted to star in them. His lifelong dream of directing
(03:45):
was something he carried with him until his Final Days.
If only Don could have directed, But Don wasn't the director.
Where Don saw a movie about free will, Schrader saw
existential despair. Where Don saw glossy commercial film with Richard
Gear strutting around in his underwear and a montage devoted
entirely around him getting dressed, Schrader saw a somber French
(04:07):
New Wave film. He even lifted the last scene of
Brisson's Pickpocket for the ending Gosh. In that final scene,
Schrader is trying to make a religious statement, which is
(04:29):
what makes the film a signature Schrader movie. But what
makes the film an unmistakably Don Simpson movie was the
glitz and the glamor, and how gay the whole movie was.
After Saturday Night Fever, Don had again taken on his
mission statement that Peter Biskind referenced in his book Easy Writer,
Raging Boss. Don was repackaging gay culture for a heterosexual audience.
(04:53):
When I first interviewed Don, we went out on Santa
Monica Boulevard looking for the prototype for the movie. I
said to Don, look, there's no straight gigglows in West Hollywood.
They're all gay. And Don said, that's actually a good thing.
We can create our own gigglow. What he meant by
that was that the best sort of movie is when
you can create our own fantasy. And so that's why
(05:16):
you see scene after scene devoted to showing Richard Gear
like Cinderella going to the ball, spending hours getting dressed,
trying on outfits. But in this case it wasn't a
costume designer pulling clothes for Richard Gere. Don had recruited
Georgio Armani. At that time, Armani was relatively unknown in America.
In a two hour running time, the film showcases every
(05:39):
stitch of Armani's line brand creation on the movie screen.
It had never been done before. I mean, for Don,
the clothes always made the man. It got to one
point during shooting that Richard Gear had to ask are
you filming my character or the clothes? And Don's response was,
how about we go to the other extra and have
(06:00):
you in no clothes at all. American Giggielow marked the
first time a major Hollywood actor went full frontal on screen.
It's the kind of gratuitous nude we've seen women pose
for a million times. How did Don and Schrader rationalize
the scene with the studio. At the time, Paramount was
coming out with their Oscar favorite Ordinary People and prepping
(06:22):
the kid friendly Indiana Jones. Why rescorting controversy from the
religious right and Jerry Folwell, it was Don's upbringing as
a child, growing up with fundamentalist parents. Don knew better
than anyone that poking the religious right could be good
for business. The critics, but for a select few, hated
the film. It's a strong picture. I agree with you,
(06:45):
and you know, Roger, you and I are alone. I
think as critics cross the country in liking this picture,
everybody else seems to be knocking it. I don't understand why.
But the gamble paid off. Audiences and even the most
conservative parts of the country loved the film. Don had
turned another relative unknown actor, in this case Richard Gere
(07:06):
into a movie star after Giggelow. Don had no interest
in working with another a tour filmmaker invoking themes of
Dostoevsky and Bresson. Don was a populist. He wanted to
entertain everyone Red states and blue states, and he had
a unique vision for what a Don Simpson movie could be.
It was more than a vision, it was a manifesto,
(07:28):
written late at night after perhaps one too many lines
of cocaine. It was over thirty pages long. He would
title it high Concept. When we return, we'll learn of
how Don's wild night on cocaine would produce the memo
that would forever change the movie business. I was there
(07:58):
the night he wrote the memo. We were Jimmy Green's
house off Miller Drive, behind the Chateau. It was the
house they used in Lee Marvin's Point Blank. Jimmy was
a big real estate developer. He was known for his
parties with the late late crowd coming over from the
Rainbow Room, the washed up heavy metal rockers, the broken
party girls, the real estate fat cats looking for young girls,
(08:20):
you know Don's people. Anyway, I hadn't seen Don in
over two hours. Then somebody said he'd locked himself in
the bathroom. I finally get him to open the door.
He's on the floor. There he is. He's got his
shirt off. He's very tan in his five oh one jeans.
This was when Don was very handsome, around the time
(08:41):
he had the offer to pose for Play Girl. Anyway,
he's on speaker phone and he's dictating what I can
only describe as a sermon to his assistant. It really
felt like I was hearing something profound and important. I mean,
I still remember the opening lines, we have obligation to
(09:02):
make history. We have no obligation to make art. Our
only obligation is to make money. It was the Gettysburg
address of Hollywood memos. Don tells me the memo is
called high concept. Ask him what it means. He says,
high concept is a concept you can summer in a
(09:23):
single sentence, thirty seconds or less, pitched in the elevator,
in the hot dog line at the bank. Then he
tells me to turn on the TV to MTV. Bands
can reach millions of people in a two minute video.
The movie business needs this kind of marketing. We need
to understand the movie in a slogan, in a phrase,
(09:46):
in a concept. The high concept phrase spread like wildfire.
Dan was preaching a whole new way to view popular culture, music, art, movies, politics,
All of it could be consumed through one big idea.
For those who have abandoned hope, we'll restore hope, and
(10:20):
we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make
America great again. Some say high concept was just another
term for dumbing things down. Others argued that no, what
high concept meant was a rigorous vetting of the big
idea that could reach the largest audience in Hollywood. Everybody
was talking about the memo and scrambling to figure out
(10:41):
how to translate Don's prophecy into action. Years later, the
founder of Grand Theft, Auto and rock Star Games, one
of the most successful video game companies of all time,
was so inspired by the maverick nature of Don Simpson
and his high concept that he asked his employees to
wear t shirts with Don's face printed on them eve
and after his death. Don was the wild maverick character
(11:03):
that corporate CEOs aspired to be. But it wasn't just
Dun's memo that changed the business. It was Don's understanding
of the economics of the business. The way that Don
broke it down to me was a simple art versus
commerce formula. In the nineties seventies, the art drove the money.
You took a chance on an artist, you part up
three million for the picture, and you hope for the best.
(11:25):
Release costs were minimal. The marketing ads were paid by
the theaters. You opened the movie in just a few cities.
The states were low if you get the budgets low.
But Dawn said no to all of that. Don said,
let's make pictures with confidence. Let's put our money in
a concept that we all believe in. Let's go all
(11:47):
in with national media buys. Let's open wide and blow
the other studios out of the water. The concept was
revolutionary at the time, but for Dan's scheme to work,
his team had to convince the head of the studio,
Charlie Bluehorn. That would prove difficult. The press nicknamed Bluethorn,
Hurricane Charlie and the mad Austrian of Wall Street. Charlie
(12:10):
was a blustery, emotional man who cried at movies and
spoke in a heavy accent. Go by the seat of
your pants. Make pictures people want to see, not this
fancy schmancy stuff. I want to see tears laughs. Barry
Diller called him a romantic businessman, a one of a kind,
and Charlie Don saw a mentor, a guy whose restlessness
(12:32):
matched his own. The problem was Charlie was too restless.
Don could never pin him down. He was spending more
and more time in the Dominican Republic, where he was
building his very own city to make that happen, he
was frequently on the phone with Richard Nixon trying to
curry economic advantages for his Dominican sugar plantations. I don't
(12:52):
believe in and let people hit up saying older you
will leave this part of the body its plesser land,
and so they comes to take acres away from you.
Usually responded by saying that I'm going to support you
(13:12):
for government next year because one of you. He says,
you don't want to lose of your life acres to me.
That doesn't have any logic or any nets at all.
With Bluehorn's obsession with Nixon and his dream of his
empire city and the Dominican he had become largely absent
from the studio, Don would lose an ally who shared
his passion for movies. He was already out of step
(13:35):
with the Killer Dillers. Diller and Michael Eisner and Katzenberg
were businessmen, first number counters, and their bottom line was
under threat from a looming writer's guild strike. It was
so tense at the studio that Eisner would green light
six films in one day to go into production. One
of them was a film Don warned him not to
make He was a beautiful white dog that was hurt
(14:01):
and wounded. She nursed him back to health. He became
her best friend. What are you doing? Playful, loyal, protective,
He was a perfect companion until she discovered someone trained
(14:23):
him to attack and kill at will. You got yourself
an attacked dog, a dog trained by the professionals to
attack people. That dog that's got to be stopped before
he killed somebody. So let's say somebody training to be
an attacked dog. There's got to be a place when
(14:45):
you retrain these dogs, and I'll find a place. Come on, Julie,
you got a four leg A time bomb. White Dog
was based on a novel written by Roman Gary. The
BBC called Roman Gary one of the great literary con men.
So invited us for dinner. And when a few weeks
later I left for Paris again where I had work,
(15:06):
I said, too, of my Garry, please take care of
my wife. She will be a learning company. He said, sure,
I'll do, and he did. Jean Seberg barely twenty one
years old. Roman Gary was a figure of immense glamor,
a soldier who had fought alongside the goal, an author
whose novel The Roots of heaven had won the prestigious
pregn cour Gary was a nineteen fifty nine Francis consul
(15:30):
general in Los Angeles. I was in Paris to interview Gary.
There was a rumor he challenged Clint Eastward to a
duel after having an affair with his wife, Jean Seberg.
Gary said it was true. This was just months before
he committed suicide. He was more than a novelist. He
was a screenwriter. He was an aviator, a war hero,
(15:51):
a French diplomat. He died with JFK dated Starlett's. But
what he was perhaps best known for was being an
absolutely conscionable liar. He lied so much his biographer entitled
his book at all story. He made up stories the
way you and I made up beds. Of course, it
(16:12):
wasn't at all surprising that Don found Gary to be
quite a colorful character. But Gary didn't feel the same
way about Dawn. Gary wanted no part of a culture
that glorified toxic masculinity. He thought men like Don were
using masculinity as a facade to cover up weakness. It
was an odd relationship, one con man calling out another.
(16:36):
We could find no statements that Don had a personal
vendetta against Gary or any relationship at all, but it
was clear he thought a movie about a racist attack
dog would be a disaster. Gary supposedly wrote it as
an allegorical fable based on Jean Seeberg in her time
with the Black Panthers. In the movie, a young Hollywood
actress played by Christie McNichol accidentally runs over a German shepherd.
(17:00):
Little does she know the dog has been trained as
a puppy to attack black people. I ain't no attack dog. God,
that's a white dog. Of course, he's a white dog.
I don't mean his color. He's gone to attack and
kill black people. That's crazy. I don't believe that. What
the hell? Huh? You see the scart, lady, You see
(17:22):
this goddamn scart? Well, I got that when I was
fourteen years old. A white dog did it. Eisner liked
the thematic questions of the story. Is racism inherent? Is
a curable? Is reform attainable? It's difficult to imagine a
studio today releasing a commercial movie with such philosophical intent.
For all of Eisner's talk, he touted its commercial appeal.
(17:46):
It was it was Jaws with paws. He shouted, but
instead of hiring a commercial director like Steven Spielberg, Paramount
hired perhaps the most econoclastic and most stubbornly independent director
of all time. Now Jeane Faller said, whenever you interview
any son of a bitch, you remember, there's not two faces.
There's not two sides, there's three. Now the third side
(18:09):
you'll never get to know. Really now we can call
the third side the mistress. Every human being has a
mistress in the brainy. Every the mom and papa will
never know what that son of daughter is saying ever
until they die. Never, no one will know. You can
be married for ninety years and the other the mate.
You will never know. That's called the third face. It's
(18:32):
a mistress. It's a secret. Don knew he wouldn't be
able to rein in Sam Fuller, not the man who
gave us the Naked Kiss and Shot Corridor. Fuller's big
idea was to shift the po V from the victims
to the dogs. We'd see the dogs slowly unraveled into
a psychotic killer of black people. Nobody at the studio
(18:53):
accounted for the protests from the black community. The n
double a CP came out warning the studio the film
would in site racial violence and told blacks to boycott.
The Black Anti Defamation Coalition warned it would spark race riots.
Don was beside himself. How did he get stuck with
a movie about a racist dog, and with another defiant
(19:14):
autour director whose mess he would have to clean up.
When would the studio learn this was not the way
to make money, let alone make movies. The bad publicity
piled up. The l A Times called it a racist production.
Don argued, how could a film production be racist? Fuller
fought with the press, arguing that they needed to show
the dark side of racism in order to see the
(19:36):
arc to anti racism. More groups threatened boycotts, and yet
Eisner was convinced it would be a hit. Just get
the poster ride and they'd be fine. Don knew better.
This was a rabid dog attacking people, not an ominous
shark in the water. There was no suspense, no drama.
Paramount Don thought had lost its way when he first
(19:59):
started it out at the studio, they had conviction. Now
they were cravenly hedging their bets, reducing exposure, selling off
foreign rights, which meant lower risk, but more cooks in
the kitchen, which to don was bad business. Either go
all in or go home. If you want to have
your bats, go to Wall Street. This was the movie business.
(20:21):
It didn't help matters that Hollywood studios were still holding
onto making art house films. And a big reason why
was that the American public listened to film critics unlike today.
They had tremendous cloud over whether a movie would do
well at the box office, and no critic had more
cloud than Pauline Kale. It's a very even thing, particularly
(20:43):
for a woman, I think, to be writing at home.
It's a It's a marvelous way to make a living.
I think I wanted all in my life to be
able to make them living at home. The only thing
I disliked is having to go to the city to
see the movies. I love seeing the movies, but it's
hell going through the process of getting to the city,
as I lived several hours from New York City. But
(21:04):
but the process is simply thinking. Really, I mean, writing
is simply, you know, putting down what you think and
to be paid for thinking. Uh, and to know that
you're doing something that that may even have some value,
that you know that some other people might enjoy that
process and share it with you. I mean, that's that's
(21:26):
a marvelous way to live. I mean, I can't think
of any better way to live. Kale was an unknown
writer in seven when she wrote a seven thousand word
review arguing that Bonnie and Clyde was a masterpiece. The
movie had been considered a failure, but after Kal's review,
it was reconsidered to be one of the great films
of the era. Kao had the power to make a
(21:47):
movie a hit or a failure at a time when
film criticism really mattered. Kale's reviews turned her into a
crusader for the art house film, and in Dawn, the
King of the Blockbuster, she would meet her match. When
We Return, Don and Warren Baby team up to take
down Pauline. Their rivalry began with Popeye. Bob Evans told
(22:18):
Don he wanted Altman to direct it. Don hated Altman movies,
and he hated the man even more. The feeling was mutual.
When Don died, Altman wrote, I only wish he had
suffered more. But Don was overruled by Evans, who had
great respect for Altman, in large part because everybody's favorite
art house critic Pauline Klee loved Altman. Evans got the
(22:42):
studio to give Altman a massive budget. Altman hired Jules Phifer,
another art house intellectual that Don loathe, to write the script.
He hired Robin Williams as the lead, even though he
had done nothing but Mork and Mindy. He then chose
Malten to shoot because it was as far away as
he could get from them. Ed Link, Dawn and the
paramount execs. In the end, Altman may just what Don
(23:05):
had feared an Oakland movie. In looking back on Popeye,
the movie has its qualities. There's a real sweetness to
the performances and all at once. I knew. I knew it. Once,
I knew he needed me until the day I die.
(23:29):
I won't know why I knew he needed me. He
could be fantasy. Oh, or maybe it's because he needs me.
(23:50):
He needs me. He needs me, he needs me, he
needs me, he needs me. But for Dawn, the results
were a disaster. Evans had taken their most commercial property
and turned it into an art house trifle. Don laid
the blame squarely on Pauline Kale. She was a menace
(24:11):
who needed to be terminated. Don wasn't the conniving sort
to plot Pauline Kale's demise. As fate would have it,
he wouldn't have to. The story goes that Warren Beatty
had been courting Pauline for months to produce movies with him.
Pauline was used to having movie stars and directors courting her.
Filmmakers like Robert Town had put in months of phone
calls and dinner dates to secure an admiring film review
(24:33):
that could bring millions in box office. But Betty had
a bigger endgame. He had sensed that Pauline was unhappy
at The New Yorker. Behind the scenes, he had negotiated
with Barry Diller to give Pauline an executive position. He
would promise her in office, and her first project would
be Love and Money, to be directed by James Toback,
whose movie Fingers Pauline had given a rave review. It
(24:58):
was easy for Beatty to sell Barry Diller on Pauline.
He had long been a fan and understood her importance
in the business. For Batty, it meant having an ally
at the studio to help him produce his movies. What
was shocking was that Pauline, the most famous film critic
in the world said yes. Just days after Beatty's proposal,
(25:19):
she would quit The New Yorker. Pauline's friends had warned
her not to go to Hollywood. She was a film
critic living in the Berkshires who would take the train
into New York City each week to see movies and
write reviews. She had a charmed life. Why give it
all up to move into those shark infested waters of Hollywood?
Don was asking the same question. You can imagine Don's
(25:41):
tremendous shock to learn of Paramounts new Higher, the critic
who had been the bane of Don's existence, was now
sitting in his office. Dawn couldn't believe his good fortune.
Here was Pauline Kale in his office talking about pretentious
art house movie projects that she like to make a paramount.
(26:02):
It wasn't a question of if Don would destroy the
career of Pauline Kale. It was a matter of when.
A few weeks into the job, Kale knew she was
in trouble. James Tobak had not been receptive to her
script notes. In his mind, a script was not finite,
but a morphous something to be shaped in production. When
(26:22):
Tobak froze her out. She saw protection in Barry Diller,
but it was soon clear to her that the business
was about getting movies made quickly, and that spending months
on scripts was not economically viable. To make matters worse,
she had to answer to Dawn, the man who, in
her mind, represented the lowest common denominator of filmmaking, a
(26:45):
Neanderthal who thought a movie's genius was in its marketing
potential as a one sentence tagline on a poster. Don,
for his part, treated Kale with respect. He of course
rejected every single one of her movie ideas, but always
with a polite note as to why the studio couldn't
give her the green light. This went on for months.
(27:07):
Pauline would go to Don's office and Don would politely
say no. As Don later told Paul Schrader, Pauline Kale
was his surprise birthday cake. All he had to do
was used the knife. For the next five months, ko
sat alone in her office, waiting for various producers to
drop by so she could offer up her opinions. Opinions
(27:27):
that at one time had shaped the hearts and minds
of film audiences all over the world were now deposited
into the trash bins of Paramount. There was simply no
path forward for Kal. Her only way out was to
quit the studio and crawl back to the New Yorker.
She wasn't the same critic when she returned. She had
seen the inside of the Hollywood machine firsthand, and it
(27:49):
was more loathsome than anything she had ever heard. She
had lost her love for the movies. The high concept
era was coming, and the beloved artist that she had championed, Altman, Ashby, Bogdanovitch, Koppola,
even Scorsese were sidelined. There was no purpose, no importance
for a great champion of films like Pauline Klee. Klee's
(28:12):
downfall was a big victory for Dawn. The great directors
of the decade were now pushed aside. Don's path was
now clear. There was a light at the end of
the tunnel, if he could only get out of his
own self destructive way. The Dawn season two is executive
produced by Will McCormick and David Harris Klein. Klein also
(28:35):
wrote and created the series. Mike Jursits is the editor,
sound designer, and producer of the series. The podcast is
produced and narrated by Malia River. Drew Louis Weymouth voices
the character of Pierce and also produces the series. For
more episodes of The Dawn season two, listened to the
series on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you
listen to podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com